The Still Point (26 page)

 

In the first damp chills of September, in 1902, four Norwegian survivors were found on Spitzbergen, and Emily Mackley ebbed away to her room where she was thought to be grieving, or whatever equivalent is left to the wives of the not dead but lost. But she emerged from her self-imposed confinement the following summer, fuller and quieter, and assured anyone who asked that she had not given up hope. A slip of the tongue and the truth is out: she was, indeed, confined, in the sense in which her contemporaries used the word. And no one knew; no one but John and Arabella, who had good reason to keep the secret hidden. Since winter, when the truth began to show, Arabella too had been concealed from the world. She lay upon her bed, reading romantic novels and stroking the spread flesh of her flat, if well-covered, stomach and hoping too, waiting… but of course they couldn’t afford to be betrayed by a genuine swelling. John was courteous, and bent down each night to wish her sweet dreams with a kiss on her soft, plump cheek, but had a cot made up for him beside the big double bed, and Arabella’s fingers, outstretched in the night, could just barely graze his quilt.

Jonathan explains all of this as if it were an interesting fragment of family history, an Edwardian oddity. Let us be clear, then: on 6 July 1903, Emily Mackley gave birth to a healthy boy, who was rapidly taken from her and christened Edward by her husband’s brother and his wife, who had for the last seven months feigned a pregnancy of her own. The household staff could not have
missed the deception, and could not have mistaken Emily’s yells for their mistress in labour, but remained loyal and silent and the secret stayed bound within the walls of the house. And two weeks later Emily was wakened, perhaps by the cry of her own son in the nursery down the hall, or perhaps as usual by the birds in the willow; and rose and dressed in plain grey and came down to breakfast and said she would take some toast, and no, she had not given up hope. And so a scandal was avoided, and the legend of her patience remained intact. It is not certain whether Arabella, by all accounts a dull woman who hadn’t the wit to keep a diary, or else had the good sense to destroy it, knew of the child’s parentage. Emily, who had loved only one man in her life and betrayed him only once, of course knew. And so, we can assume, did John.

Edward Mackley the younger was raised, then, as John and Arabella’s own, each day his likeness to the Mackley men remaining carefully unremarked upon by his parents and his supposed aunt. The three of them were plunged into a peculiar evasive embarrassment when visitors noted how like his father the boy was.

Arabella had a child of her own two years later. Thomas, stocky, large, florid, was every copious inch Arabella’s son, but had nothing of the dark, lean quickness of the Mackleys. Helen followed, unexpected, in 1916. Arabella died quietly enough some time in 1934, and passed out of history with as little an eddy as her entry had stirred. John remained a profoundly liberal, compassionate man until his death early in 1937, thus spared by two years the dubious satisfaction of proving to have been right about Europe all along. The house was bequeathed quite legitimately to Edward, the older son; Thomas had already found his own path, which took him over the Atlantic.

By the time Edward inherited, he had been living, teaching and practising
in London for more than ten years. He had married a graduate of University College, an unremarkably clever girl he had taught and fell in love with in his own restrained way. Neither Edward nor his young wife, who had been brought up in Highbury, had a use for the house or any desire to forgo the city; so they left it in Helen’s care (and Emily along with it), returning occasionally for fleeting and oddly uncomfortable visits. In appearance, Edward was very like his father, and like his namesake uncle also, but he lacked the long gaze that was to re-emerge incongruous in the blue eyes of Thomas’s grandson (and which is even now shining upon Julia in the garden, casting a ruthless light into previously dark corners). It was, in fact, the severity of Edward’s shortsightedness that saved him from conscription in 1939. And perhaps it was also what had blinded him to his Aunt Emily’s tears when he went up to Cambridge at the age of eighteen, and also when he returned to say goodbye for the last time forty years later, to find her more or less where he’d left her, in the modest room she’d slept in since she was a young deserted bride.

‘She told him, on her deathbed. And he told his brother — my grandpa. They weren’t close. I think he thought there might be legal implications. A cautious man, your grandfather, and honest too. But Grandpa, well, you know.’

No; again, Julia doesn’t know. She’s not sure she knows anything any more. He sees her looking at him blankly, as if lost. Lost in the snow.

‘He’s rich enough,’ says Jonathan, by way of explanation. ‘Not the type to start suing his own brother after all that time. Knew better than to take on his sister, too, and anyway wasn’t about to uproot the ladies. What could it matter? So they let the sleeping dog lie.’ As if stuffed. Posed into a contented nap and mounted to sleep that way for ever with its glass eyes shut.

Julia still doesn’t say anything.

‘I’m surprised Emily didn’t tell Aunt Helen. Perhaps she was embarrassed; John was Helen’s father too, after all.’

Embarrassed.
Embarazada
, indeed. How embarrassing, to have your husband’s brother’s baby. Only three years since she’d said goodbye and she betrayed him. Embarrassed or ashamed or disgusted with herself and trying to forget it. Or else she was too sad to think about any of it any more… but this sounds to Julia like an excuse, like forgiveness. She betrayed him, she did not wait. She could not go on without — without what? This is not, then, some romantic aporia.

 

 

Julia flushes, shocked at these words which come unbidden and do not belong with brave patient Emily, waiting. Her face is burning. It is so hot. Her head is full of the pound of hot blood, her ears feel stopped with it, her cheeks feel swollen, her mouth with its red slick of paint feels ridiculous. Here is a chair. She has sat down.

‘Julia — are you all right? I’m sorry, have I upset you?’ Jonathan perches his bulk upon the spindly iron-fretwork chair beside her.

‘Oh, it’s just so hot. No, I’m fine. I’m quite all right. Would you like another drink? I’ll be fine, I just. Perhaps we should go inside.’

They return to the drawing room. Jonathan is solicitous, concerned. Julia is determined to be a good hostess, and presses another gin that he has refused upon him, bright and brittle and rattling the bottle against the glass.

Close to the end of Emily’s life, young Edward (almost sixty years old now) came to visit her, and found his sister Helen at her bedside in a bright and placid room, the two women exchanging half-sentences peacefully. He sat with them until Emily’s head began to nod, and took Helen to one side.

‘Is she drunk?’

‘Probably.’

‘Do you think it’s a good idea, to let her drink?’

‘Do you think it’s a good idea to stop her? What harm can it do her now?’

‘And you, drinking with her?’

Helen smiled at that. ‘I’m a lost cause, Dr Mackley. You should know your sister by now.’

Edward left the following morning. He had always felt awkward in that house, although he was born there; he felt a little out of place everywhere he went, but, because the house should have been home to him, felt it there more keenly. Helen remembered the hush that preceded him into every room, in the days when he haunted her childhood with the pale glower of his adolescence. He would always find the most difficult spot to halt at, neither in nor out, always somewhere between sitting and leaving so that conversation couldn’t possibly continue. And, she thought, it pained him that he didn’t know where he should sit.

That morning, he had brought Emily’s breakfast tray to her: half a pink
grapefruit, already segmented with a special knife designed for the purpose; two slices of toast cut very thin from a fresh loaf, as she liked it, with an apricot preserve that they had made last summer; and tea in a primrose-patterned teacup that is now gathering dust in the dresser, part of the china that Julia daren’t use for fear of breakage.

Edward watched as she slurped each grapefruit segment. It was warm, August, she wore a high-necked sleeveless cotton nightgown, and he saw that her arms, once strong, had grown slack and thin. He remembered her lean and powerful, and now she was shrunken, her shoulders round and narrow, her gown stained with jam that she dabbed at absent-mindedly. He knew from the darkening of her skin, from her thickened white fingernails and the flowering blood vessels on the back of her hand, that her liver was failing; he remembered her always with a drink in her hand.

 

Of course, there was a time between girlhood and old age, for Emily; Julia knew this, of course. And she has heard the stories of an independent, strong-willed woman–a woman who took her honeymoon skiing in Norway, after all, and returned on a ship alone. Emily in middle age, always soberly dressed (even if she wasn’t always sober, the family would chuckle), keeping up with modern poetry, going to the theatre, thrilled by cinema when it came to the town, a twentieth-century woman — but she was also, and always first and foremost for Julia, the Emily that waited for Edward, who did not remarry but longed for him always.

 

Here she is, in the drawing room; sitting on the sofa with a tall glass as the boy walks in, hesitating at the door.

‘Come sit with your Aunt Emily, Edward. How like your uncle you are. Will you be a sailor, Edward? Or will you stay close to shore?’

Edward takes a wary seat at his aunt’s side, smelling the lime on her hands as she holds his face in them.

‘I shall be a doctor, I think, like Father, Aunty.’

‘A doctor, a doctor, indeed. But ships need doctors, Edward; sailors do sicken, too.’ He could never be sure if she was laughing at him.

‘Now, Emily. Let the boy alone,’ says John, not unkindly, indulgent even. ‘Another?’ he notes, eyebrow raised, as Emily pours herself a gin with a steady hand, squeezes another slice of lime.

‘Oh, not another, naughty Aunt Emily! Too far north again, as we used to say. Do you know that phrase? Like a drunken sailor, what shall we do with her?’ She smiles, indulgent in turn and adding another splash. ‘Citrus for scurvy, isn’t it, Doctor?’ And she flicks her front tooth, making Arabella, stitching quietly in the corner, wince. ‘You won’t catch a tooth falling from
my
head.’ Arabella has been plagued since girlhood with cavities — which, she insists, can in no way be connected to her fondness for fondants. Emily is not a tactless woman, so this must be rare spite in the guise of tactlessness, sharpened by the spirit. ‘And quinine for malarial fever. I am quite equipped, by the contents of this glass, for any ills our fine empire might throw at me, should I choose to venture out,’ she triumphs, finishing the drink with tonic water and taking her seat again beside her nephew with a bounce. And little Edward, his brow ever drawn down in a determined frown, refuses to see her sadness or return the squeeze of her hand.

 

And many years later, he came to see her before she passed, and stood
awkwardly at her bedside, trying not to watch the mess her old mouth made of her breakfast. When she had pushed away the second piece of toast halfeaten, she turned to him. He had been telling her about his son, twenty now and an undergraduate, a medical student like his father and his grandfather and all the first-born Mackleys (Miranda, of course, included). How proud he was.

‘Have you a photograph?’ asked Emily, suddenly eager.

‘Of William? Certainly.’

He produced a picture from his wallet. It is the picture that is now framed on the bedside table, for Emily asked if she might keep it, and Julia, who had put it in a drawer in the embarrassment of early adolescence, retrieved it six years later and restored it to its place, when it was all that was left of him — because this, of course, is her father; so look carefully. An earnest, quiet man who would waste away before he was fifty. Here, a young man of nineteen, the hair which had barely begun to grey when he died is thick and dark and worn over his ears in a curiously wavy style which would in time lengthen to suit the decade that was beginning. In 1960, though, it is a wilfully Romantic decision, because in truth he is a sensitive soul who likes to remind himself that Keats, too, trained as a doctor. He has the black and searching eyes that bypassed his short-sighted father, the same eyes that penetrated John Mackley’s patients and the same that Edward almost saw the Pole with.

Emily looked from the photograph to her son and back and then further back, into her own past.

‘You are so like him, both of you.’ With an effort to raise herself on her pillows, she reached up to remove Edward’s thick glasses; he blinked, and she smiled. ‘I wonder if he would have grown to look like you.’ Her son was now twenty-five years older than her husband had been when she saw him last.

But this Edward’s shoulders were not so broad; he was lean but a little bellyful of good living rested comfortably on his belt; and his eyes, unaided, could not see further than two feet beyond himself, let alone beyond the horizon. Still, he was like him; Emily put a hand to his cheek, and left it there cold and dry for a moment that felt longer and stranger than it should have for Edward.

With a sigh, she passed his glasses back to him. And then she told her secret, sad and calm. He thought how he had never much loved his mother and wondered if this was perhaps why; and understood why he had always felt awkward around his aunt — because she loved him more than she ought to. He said sorry, awkwardly, without knowing what or who he was sorry for. She offered no apology or tears. It seemed to both too late to recover anything now; it was long past and her life nearly over. A little later he left, managing to brush her papery cheek with a kiss. She lay for a long time looking at the photograph of William, the grandson she could never own. Then Helen came in, and took it gently from her hands.